OpenBSD/sparc64 runs on the 64bit Sun UltraSPARC machines based
on the UltraSPARC I, II, III, and T1 processors.
A mailing list dedicated to the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 ports is
available at sparc@openbsd.org.
To join the OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/sparc64 mailing list, send a message
body of "subscribe sparc" to
majordomo@openbsd.org.
Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before
subscribing.
The current port maintainer is Mark Kettenis
(kettenis@openbsd.org).
Others are definitely welcome to contribute!
The original port was made for NetBSD by Eduardo Horvath and released for
the first time in January 1999.
The porting to OpenBSD started in August 2001 and in the end of September the
first binary snapshot was released. The porting was done mainly by Jason
Wright and Artur Grabowski and was done on both SBus and PCI machines so that
a decently wide range of hardware support was ready even before the system
could boot multiuser.
OpenBSD 3.0 was the first official release of OpenBSD/sparc64, and since
that release support for many more devices has been added (including
devices required for X11R6 support). The other architectures that
OpenBSD supports have benefited because some kinds of bugs are
exposed more often by the 64-bit big endian nature of UltraSPARC.
Sun refused access to the neccessary documentation for the (very bizzare)
host bridge and caches in the UltraSPARC III machines, so a few years were
lost before some reverse engineering figured out the changes in these
machines (and the undocumented processor bugs, too). In 2007, Sun
was finally convinced to release the missing
information, and development progress became more rapid.
OpenBSD 4.0 was the first release to ship with support for the
UltraSPARC III based machines; OpenBSD 4.3 first with SMP support,
and OpenBSD 4.4 will be the first to support the T1 processors.
And since there are always little bits missing, work is continuing...
Current status:
Currently most of the hardware available to the developers boots
multiuser and supports enough of the on-board devices to be generally
usable.
The X Window System is supported on most systems.
Only the ATI graphics adapters are supported with the accelerated X.Org server
at the current time.
It is possible to use X in frame buffer mode with all supported SBus
cards, as well as the on-board ATI graphics or the UPA Creator,
Creator 3D or Elite 3D at the boot resolution/depth using the wsfb(4) driver.
The directions on how to enable the accelerated and unaccelerated X server
are present in the /usr/X11R6/README file on the installed system.
Projects (in no particular order):
Improve the pmap module to reduce the number of expensive cache flushes.
Fix BE64 issues in the userland as they are discovered.
Improve architecture specific documentation.
Provide accelerated X servers for the cgsix and creator frame buffers.
Fix the CDROM interrupt spin that some machines see.
Fix the vga / schizo crashes that occur on some machines.
Supported hardware:
Supported machines
OpenBSD/sparc64 is known or expected to work on the following machines:
Ultra 1/1E
Ultra 2
Ultra 5/10
Ultra 30/60/80
SPARCengineUltra AX
SPARCengineUltra AXe
SPARCengineUltra AXi
SPARCengine CP1500
Enterprise 150
Enterprise 220R
Enterprise 250
Enterprise 420R
Enterprise 450
Enterprise 3000/4000/5000/6000
Enterprise 3500/4500/5500/6500
Enterprise 10000
Sun Blade 100/150
Sun Blade 1000/1500/2000/2500
Sun Blade T6300
Sun Fire V100/V120
Sun Fire V125
Sun Fire V210/V240/V440
Sun Fire V215/V245
Sun Fire V250
Sun Fire 280R
Sun Fire V480/V880
Sun Fire T1000/T2000
Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000/T2000
Netra X1
Netra 20/T4
Netra 120
Netra 210/240/440
Netra T1 100/105
Netra T1 AC200/DC200
Netra T 1100
Netra T 1120/1125
Netra T 1400/1405
Netra CP3060
Netra T2000
Momentum Leopard-V
RDI/Tadpole Ultrabook 170/200
Support for the UltraSPARC T1 machines and full support for the
Enterprise 10000 was first introduced in OpenBSD 4.3-current.
Please note, some machines like the Ultra1, Ultra2 and Enterprise 220R
may require upgrading the flashprom before OpenBSD can be successfully
installed.
Supported devices
Processors
UltraSPARC I, II, IIi, IIe, III, III+ and IIIi
UltraSPARC T1
Keyboards/Mice
Type 4, 5, and 6 keyboards on Zilog serial ports (zskbd)
Type 4, 5, and 6 keyboards on NS16550 serial ports (comkbd)
PCI32 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
PCI509 5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
PCI511 3.3V/5V DCF77 time signal station receiver card (mbg)
Unsupported machines
Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation
Ultra 25/45
Netra 1280/1290
Netra CP3260
Sun Blade T6320
Sun Fire V445
Sun Fire V490/V890
Sun Fire V1280
Sun Fire 3800/4800/4810/6800
Sun Fire E2900/E4900/E6900
Sun Fire 12K/15K
Sun Fire E20K/E25K
Sun Netra T5220
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220
Unsupported devices
PCMCIA (PC Card) or CardBus devices.
SBus and PCI cards other than those listed above.
Various devices may not work fully on some models.
For instance, many UltraSPARC III-based machines currently do
not support PCI Video.
Hardware documentation:
Previous to 2007, it was extremely difficult or impossible to get much of
the neccessary hardware documentation for these machines. Members of our
team (in particular David Gwynne) were instrumental in pressuring and
convincing Sun to go back into their archives and dig up the data sheets
that they had written in-house, describing the operation of their chips to
their own engineers. These documents can now be found at
http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home.
Some documents are still missing at that site, so we ask that interested
developers contact Sun and request additional information.
There are several installation media provided, so that
OpenBSD/sparc64 can be installed or upgraded via CD, floppy boot images on
some models, miniroot images for machines without floppies,
as well as network and diskless installs.
CD boot
Booting off the CD provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel containing
drivers for the most popular devices found on UltraSPARC hardware.
For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the
RAMDISK
kernel configuration file.
The CD can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with
boot cdrom
Floppy A (floppy42.fs)
Booting off the floppy provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel
containing supporting the following sparc64 hardware:
Ultra 1/1E
Ultra 2
as well as support for the on-board devices found on these machines.
However due to lack of space there are only a few other drivers.
In particular, this floppy lacks cdrom support and will not
allow installation from cdrom media.
For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the
RAMDISKU1
kernel configuration file.
The floppy can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with
boot floppy
Floppy B (floppyB42.fs)
Booting off the floppy provides a small ffs filesystem with a kernel
containing supporting the following sparc64 hardware:
SPARCengineUltra AX
SPARCengineUltra AXe
SPARCengineUltra AXi
as well as support for the on-board devices found on these machines.
However due to lack of space there are only a few other drivers.
In particular, this floppy lacks cdrom support and will not
allow installation from cdrom media.
For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the
RAMDISKU5
kernel configuration file.
The floppy can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with
boot floppy
Miniroot (miniroot42.fs)
The miniroot provides the same installation environment as the bootable CD,
and is intended for easy bootstrap if there is already an operating system
installed on the machine.
After dumping the miniroot to the primary swap partition with dd, the
miniroot can be booted off the OpenFirmware prompt with a command such as
boot disk:b
(the disk designation may be different, depending on the chosen swap
partition).
Network boot (ofwboot.net, bsd.rd)
Using a diskless setup, it is also possible to boot the OpenBSD/sparc64
boot loader, ofwboot.net, from the network via tftp, and access
the bsd.rd standalone miniroot over NFS.
Refer to the
diskless(8)
manual page for details on how to setup a network boot environment.
Please note that booting from floppy might not work on your machine; also,
Ultra 1, 1E and 2 systems might require a PROM update (they usually don't if
they are able to boot Solaris in 64bit-mode); please refer to the
installation
notes for details.